Let’s Begin With a Postscript

Since this book was originally printed (1992), a phenomenal development of apparent “corporate repentance” has arisen among numerous Christian organizations, including the Roman Catholic Church. We assume of course that they know nothing about this unpretentious volume, for it has never been “published” where they could know about it. But the following brief survey, mostly post-1992, indicates what seems almost a sympathetic response to the thesis of this book:

• 1992: “In Africa in 1992, [the pope] apologized for the [Catholic] church’s complicity in the African slave trade” (U.S. News and World Report).
• 1995: “The leader of 950 million Catholics worldwide set the tone in 1992 by formally acknowledging that 17th century church judges erred when they condemned Italian astronomer Galileo for saying the earth revolved about the sun. On other trips in 1992, John Paul apologized in Africa for church complicity in the slave trade and lamented in Latin America the Catholic exploitation of Native Americans” (The Los Angeles Times).
• 1994: Regal Books published John Dawson’s Healing America’s Wounds in which he pleads with “us” to recognize wrongs white Americans have done in the past, including the enslaving of Blacks and atrocities to Native Americans. At an ensuing reconciliation conference in Atlanta “a woman whose ancestors owned slaves knelt and took the hands of the great-grandson of a slave, repeating this prayer: ‘In the name of Jesus, I ask forgiveness for the sin of slavery, for buying human beings like animals, for saying they had no soul, for raping the women, for separating families, for tearing arms off of fathers who were trying to hold their children, for beating them bloody” (yet this particular individual had never done any of those things personally!).
• 1995: “President Jacques Chirac acknowledged Sunday what a generation of political leaders did not—that France was an accomplice in deporting thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps during the German occupation of World War II. ‘These dark hours forever sully our history and are an insult to our past and our traditions … The criminal folly of the occupiers was seconded by the French, by the French state.’ … Chirac … made a distinction between Vichy and the rest of the nation, which he called ‘upright, generous, faithful to its traditions, its genius’” (The Sacramento Bee).
• 1995: “Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi … humbly accepted the historical fact that the Japanese colonial rule inflicted unbearable damage and pain on Korean people and expressed remorseful repentance and heartfelt apology for the ordeal” (The New York Times).
• 1995: “Last week, the nation’s largest Protestant body, the Southern Baptist Convention, prayed for healing as it confessed to a sin of historic proportion. ‘We lament, repudiate, historic acts of evil such as slavery from which we continue to reap a bitter harvest’” (U.S. News and World Report, under the title of “The Era of Collective Repentance”).
• 1996: “The Nazis used many of Luther’s teachings during the Holocaust to justify their genocidal war against the Jews— ‘We express our deep and abiding sorrow over its tragic effects on subsequent generations’” (The Evangelical Lutheran Church, The Sacramento Bee).
• 1997: “Britain apologizes to Ireland 150 years later … for contributing to Ireland’s potato famine … a massive human tragedy … that still causes pain as we reflect on it today” (Tony Blair, California News Services).
• 1998: “Under the ailing Pope John Paul II, the Vatican is engaged on a grand purification to settle its debts to history before the third millennium” (Christian Tyler in The Financial Times).
• 1998: “In a papal bull titled ‘Incarnationis Mysterium’ … John Paul II asked Catholics to seek forgiveness for past historical errors” (Alessandra Stanley, New York Times).
• 1998: “Cardinal William Keeler … asked forgiveness from fellow Catholics for the church’s legacy of slavery and segregation, calling racism ‘a spiritual malady that gnawed at the moral fiber of our nation, our community and our church’” (John Biemer, Associated Press).
• 2000: “At an outdoor mass in Warsaw in May the Polish church’s leader, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, pointedly asked for forgiveness for priests who still tolerate anti-Semitism” (Beata Pasek, The Associated Press).
• A thoughtful Seventh-day Adventist writer: “Some day one group will make agapé love part of a committed lifestyle. Corporate love will be a fundamental belief, and they will be the remnant people. Where remnant people prevail, Bosnias and Rwandas cannot happen” (1996: Ella Rydzewski, Adventist Review; written after the horrendous 1995 massacres in Rwanda where some Rwandan Seventh-day Adventist leaders participated).
• Naomi Wolf writing in George says: “Plenty of whites would say that memorializing our slave past is worse than unimportant, that it is destructive to the present. … ‘I didn’t own any slaves. Why should I apologize?’ as one recent caller to a talk radio station characteristically argued.”

The same argument in principle is often heard within the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The “1888” history was over long ago; to bring it up now “is destructive to the present.” It disturbs our good feelings, our pride.

As these other churches acknowledge their corporate involvement in injustices of past centuries, “we” have our corporate wrong that has affected generations of our people and has deprived the world of something “most precious.” The God of heaven “sent” messengers and a message to us that was the “beginning” of the work of that “other angel” of Revelation 18 and consequently also the beginning of the latter rain. “In a great degree,” an inspired messenger says, “we” rejected it and “kept it away from our people and from the world.”

Well over a hundred times she says that “we” treated that message and those who bore it “as the Jews treated Christ.” She adds that the books of heaven record that “we” “insulted the Holy Spirit” at an official General Conference Session. None of our officially approved histories makes this fact prominent.

Just to “apologize” would be meaningless; to pass a resolution of official “confession” is an empty gesture. We are not concerned for ourselves. We owe something to the world. A “work meet for repentance” (John the Baptist’s phrase) would be to give that authentic “most precious message” to the church, and thence to the world population who deserve to hear it.